It began as a low hum, the kind of phantom resonance you feel in your teeth when a heavy truck rumbles past. Elias first noticed it on the Tuesday commute, wedged between a woman reeking of synthetic lavender and a man whose elbow was a persistent, bony intrusion. He thought it was the train. But when he stepped onto the platform, the hum remained, a faint C-sharp buzzing just beneath his sternum.
He tried to shake it off, blaming caffeine, blaming the gnawing lack of sleep that had become his baseline state. At his desk, compiling logistics reports that felt as meaningful as tracing patterns in dust, the hum deepened. It was no longer a single note. It was a chord, minor and mournful, vibrating through his ribcage. He began to suspect he was suffering from a peculiar, internal form of tinnitus.
The doctor, a man with a professionally serene face that didn’t quite reach his eyes, listened to Elias’s chest with a cold stethoscope. “Lungs clear, heart strong,” he announced, as if presenting an award. “We’re seeing a lot of this psychosomatic distress lately. It’s the general vibe shift. People are burnt out.” He prescribed a mindfulness app and suggested a holiday. When Elias insisted the sound was real, a physical sensation, the doctor’s smile tightened. “Anxiety is a powerful thing. It can convince you of anything.” It was a polite, clinical form of gaslighting that left Elias feeling foolish and unheard.
He tried the app. He sat cross-legged on his floor, listening to a soothing voice tell him to observe his thoughts like clouds. But the choir inside him only grew louder, swallowing the gentle instruction. It was gaining texture. He could almost discern voices, a multitude of them, all his own but layered into a dissonant chorus. They sang of missed deadlines, of the rising sea levels he’d read about while doomscrolling last night, of a cutting remark his mother had made when he was twelve. They sang of the pathetic inadequacy of his potted basil plant.
Within a month, he could no longer function. The constant, internal music was a torment. He stopped going to work, a final act in a long, undeclared campaign of quiet quitting. His apartment became a cave. Unwashed dishes colonized the sink, and dust bunnies drifted like malevolent tumbleweeds. He was deep in his goblin mode era, and the choir provided a relentless, custom-made soundtrack for his decay. It sang of failure in complex, overlapping harmonies.
One rain-lashed afternoon, desperate for a silence that wasn’t his own, he went to the public library. He sat in a worn armchair, the damp wool of his coat smelling of defeat. The choir screamed inside him, a crescendo of self-loathing. He squeezed his eyes shut, pressing his palms against his chest as if to physically stifle the sound.
“Fighting it only makes them sing louder.”
The voice was soft, right beside him. He opened his eyes. A woman sat in the adjacent chair, a book of poetry open on her lap. She was pale, with dark circles under her eyes that looked less like exhaustion and more like smudged kohl. She wasn’t looking at him, but at the rain-streaked window.
“Your choir is sharp,” she said calmly. “All jagged edges.”
Elias stared, speechless. “You can… hear it?”
She gave a small, wry smile. “No. But I have one, too.” She tapped a slender finger against her collarbone. “Mine’s more of a dirge, these days. Very melancholic. Lots of cello.”
Her name was Lena. She explained it was a condition without a proper name, a plague of song. It fed on resistance. The more you tried to silence it, the more desperately it performed. “All that wellness and self-care nonsense,” she murmured, gesturing vaguely towards a display of glossy magazines. “Positive affirmations, gratitude journals… it’s like trying to put out a fire with gasoline. The choir knows you’re lying.”
Elias felt a crack appear in the wall of his misery. “So what do you do?”
“You listen,” she said simply. “You give it a stage. You stop trying to have some kind of main character energy where you heroically overcome your darkness. You just let the darkness be. You harmonize.”
He thought she was insane. Harmonize with the sound that was destroying him? But his own methods had led him here, to a dusty library chair, smelling of mould and psychic despair. That night, instead of trying a sleep story on his phone, he lay in the dark and did as she said. He listened.
The choir began its usual assault: a frantic soprano of professional anxieties, a rumbling bass of existential dread. But instead of flinching, Elias focused on one voice. The one that simply sang, over and over, “You are lonely.” It was a pure, sad, simple note. He didn’t argue with it. He didn’t try to fix it. He just… heard it. He let the truth of it wash over him, a cold, clean wave.
And the most peculiar thing happened. The soprano shriek began to soften. The chaotic drumming of his pulse-beat, which always accompanied the choir, slowed and found a rhythm. The voice singing of loneliness didn’t vanish, but it was joined by a new, tentative harmony—one of quiet acceptance. The dissonance resolved into a chord that was still sad, but no longer painful. It was just… music.
He didn’t sleep, not really. He drifted in a state of deep listening, conducting the orchestra of his own soul. He learned the melodies of his fears, the rhythms of his regrets. By morning, the subcutaneous choir was still there. It would always be there. But it was no longer a torment. It was the low, thrumming, honest song of himself. Stepping outside, the world looked the same, but it sounded entirely different. He could feel the silent vibrations of the city, the frantic, hidden hums of the people rushing past, each containing their own secret, frantic, and beautiful noise.
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